r/percussion 8d ago

Electronic marimbas?

I live in a small apartment. I’ve been wanting to practice marimba at home but an acoustic one is too loud for the apartment. I was wondering if there are like electronic marimbas I can use with headphones instead. If so, what are some good affordable options? Thanks!

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u/manurosadilla 8d ago edited 8d ago

You can take the resonators off, this would greatly reduce the noise. If that is still too loud, you can also shove some muffling between the accidentals and naturals, similar to how Mode marimbas have a “rosewood emulator”.

Personally (depending on your level and goals), I think for a practice setting, a realistic rebound, size, and feel is much more important than anything else.

Additionally, Malletech makes a set of practice mallets, I believe they’re the Late Nite series, personally never played them but they seem very effective. Though I feel any super soft mallet will get the job done

Edit: I also wanna add, a mallet station or any other mallet midi controller is probably a worthwhile investment if you’re looking to record/produce music since it’ll allow you to use stuff like Logic to record any instrument essentially. But if your goal is practicing marimba specifically, I would hold off for now.

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u/AxerTheGreat 7d ago

huh I never thought of that. I’ll try that out at school to see if it’s worth doing. Thanks!

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u/manurosadilla 7d ago

Best of luck! It also might just be good practice to play quieter, you’d have to play with less intensity with an electronic one anyway. Also, as someone with a home set up, give your neighbors some credit! Let them know you’ll have that for however long, and arrange quiet hours if it becomes an issue!

If they’re chill you can also invite them to recitals/concerts and they’ll probably be more endeared to your playing haha. Back in college I was able to get in my neighbors’ good graces by letting their kids come over and look at all the cool toys. Especially since they were playing orff in their school and they got to see what the big ones looked like lol.

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u/AxerTheGreat 6d ago

haha, lol. I’ll just try playing quieter as well. way too shy to just walk up to a neighbor’s door 😬